HOW INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DESTROYS LIBERTY.
"Nevertheless," said the doctor, "I have stated only half the reason the
judges would give wherefore they could not, by returning your wealth,
permit the impairment of our collective economic system and the
beginnings of economic inequality in the nation. There is another great
and equal right of all men which, though strictly included under the
right of life, is by generous minds set even above it: I mean the right
of liberty--that is to say, the right not only to live, but to live in
personal independence of one's fellows, owning only those common social
obligations resting on all alike.
"Now, the duty of the state to safeguard the liberty of citizens was
recognized in your day just as was its duty to safeguard their lives, but
with the same limitation, namely, that the safeguard should apply only to
protect from attacks by violence. If it were attempted to kidnap a
citizen and reduce him by force to slavery, the state would interfere,
but not otherwise. Nevertheless, it was true in your day of liberty and
personal independence, as of life, that the perils to which they were
chiefly exposed were not from force or violence, but resulted from
economic causes, the necessary consequences of inequalities of wealth.
Because the state absolutely ignored this side, which was incomparably
the largest side of the liberty question, its pretense of defending the
liberties of citizens was as gross a mockery as that of guaranteeing
their lives. Nay, it was a yet more absolute mockery and on a far vaster
scale.
"For, although I have spoken of the monopolization of wealth and of the
productive machinery by a portion of the people as being first of all a
threat to the lives of the rest of the community and to be resisted as
such, nevertheless the main practical effect of the system was not to
deprive the masses of mankind of life outright, but to force them,
through want, to buy their lives by the surrender of their liberties.
That is to say, they accepted servitude to the possessing class and
became their serfs on condition of receiving the means of subsistence.
Although multitudes were always perishing from lack of subsistence, yet
it was not the deliberate policy of the possessing class that they should
do so. The rich had no use for dead men; on the other hand, they had
endless use for human beings as servants, not only to produce more
wealth, but as the instruments of their pleasure and luxury.
"As I need not remind you who were familiar with it, the industrial
system of the world before the great Revolution was wholly based upon the
compulsory servitude of the mass of mankind to the possessing class,
enforced by the coercion of economic need."
"Undoubtedly," I said, "the poor as a class were in the economic service
of the rich, or, as we used to say, labor was dependent on capital for
employment, but this service and employment had become in the nineteenth
century an entirely voluntary relation on the part of the servant or
employee. The rich had no power to compel the poor to be their servants.
They only took such as came voluntarily to ask to be taken into service,
and even begged to be, with tears. Surely a service so sought after could
scarcely be called compulsory."
"Tell us, Julian," said the doctor, "did the rich go to one another and
ask the privilege of being one another's servants or employees?"
"Of course not."
"But why not?"
"Because, naturally, no one could wish to be another's servant or subject
to his orders who could get along without it."
"I should suppose so, but why, then, did the poor so eagerly seek to
serve the rich when the rich refused with scorn to serve one another? Was
it because the poor so loved the rich?"
"Scarcely."
"Why then?"
"It was, of course, for the reason that it was the only way the poor
could get a living."
"You mean that it was only the pressure of want or the fear of it that
drove the poor to the point of becoming the servants of the rich?"
"That is about it."
"And would you call that voluntary service? The distinction between
forced service and such service as that would seem quite imperceptible to
us. If a man may be said to do voluntarily that which only the pressure
of bitter necessity compels him to elect to do, there has never been any
such thing as slavery, for all the acts of a slave are at the last the
acceptance of a less evil for fear of a worse. Suppose, Julian, you or a
few of you owned the main water supply, or food supply, clothing supply,
land supply, or main industrial opportunities in a community and could
maintain your ownership, that fact alone would make the rest of the
people your slaves, would it not, and that, too, without any direct
compulsion on your part whatever?"
"No doubt."
"Suppose somebody should charge you with holding the people under
compulsory servitude, and you should answer that you laid no hand on them
but that they willingly resorted to you and kissed your hands for the
privilege of being allowed to serve you in exchange for water, food, or
clothing, would not that be a very transparent evasion on your part of
the charge of slaveholding?"
"No doubt it would be."
"Well, and was not that precisely the relation the capitalists or
employers as a class held toward the rest of the community through their
monopolization of wealth and the machinery of production?"
"I must say that it was."
"There was a great deal said by the economists of your day," the doctor
went on, "about the freedom of contract--the voluntary, unconstrained
agreement of the laborer with the employer as to the terms of his
employment. What hypocrisy could have been so brazen as that pretense
when, as a matter of fact, every contract made between the capitalist who
had bread and could keep it and the laborer who must have it or die would
have been declared void, if fairly judged, even under your laws as a
contract made under duress of hunger, cold, and nakedness, nothing less
than the threat of death! If you own the things men must have, you own
the men who must have them."
"But the compulsion of want," said I, "meaning hunger and cold, is a
compulsion of Nature. In that sense we are all under compulsory servitude
to Nature."
"Yes, but not to one another. That is the whole difference between
slavery and freedom. To-day no man serves another, but all the common
good in which we equally share. Under your system the compulsion of
Nature through the appropriation by the rich of the means of supplying
Nature's demands was turned into a club by which the rich made the poor
pay Nature's debt of labor not only for themselves but for the rich also,
with a vast overcharge besides for the needless waste of the system."
"You make out our system to have been little better than slavery. That is
a hard word."
"It is a very hard word, and we want above all things to be fair. Let us
look at the question. Slavery exists where there is a compulsory using of
men by other men for the benefit of the users. I think we are quite
agreed that the poor man in your day worked for the rich only because his
necessities compelled him to. That compulsion varied in force according
to the degree of want the worker was in. Those who had a little economic
means would only render the lighter kinds of service on more or less easy
and honorable conditions, while those who had less means or no means at
all would do anything on any terms however painful or degrading. With the
mass of the workers the compulsion of necessity was of the sharpest kind.
The chattel slave had the choice between working for his master and the
lash. The wage-earner chose between laboring for an employer or starving.
In the older, cruder forms of slavery the masters had to be watching
constantly to prevent the escape of their slaves, and were troubled with
the charge of providing for them. Your system was more convenient, in
that it made Nature your taskmaster, and depended on her to keep your
servants to the task. It was a difference between the direct exercise of
coercion, in which the slave was always on the point of rebellion, and an
indirect coercion by which the same industrial result was obtained, while
the slave, instead of rebelling against his master's authority, was
grateful for the opportunity of serving him."
"But," said I, "the wage-earner received wages and the slave received
nothing."
"I beg your pardon. The slave received subsistence--clothing and
shelter--and the wage-earner who could get more than these out of his
wages was rarely fortunate. The rate of wages, except in new countries
and under special conditions and for skilled workers, kept at about the
subsistence point, quite as often dropping below as rising above. The
main difference was that the master expended the subsistence wage of the
chattel slave for him while the earner expended it for himself. This was
better for the worker in some ways; in others less desirable, for the
master out of self-interest usually saw that the chattel,
children had enough; while the employer, having no stake in the life or
health of the wage-earner, did not concern himself as to whether he lived
or died. There were never any slave quarters so vile as the tenement
houses of the city slums where the wage-earners were housed."
"But at least," said I, "there was this radical difference between the
wage-earner of my day and the chattel slave: the former could leave his
employer at will, the latter could not."
"Yes, that is a difference, but one surely that told not so much in favor
of as against the wage-earner. In all save temporarily fortunate
countries with sparse population the laborer would have been glad indeed
to exchange the right to leave his employer for a guarantee that he would
not be discharged by him. Fear of losing his opportunity to work--his
job, as you called it--was the nightmare of the laborer's life as it was
reflected in the literature of your period. Was it not so?"
I had to admit that it was even so.
"The privilege of leaving one employer for another," pursued the doctor,
"even if it had not been more than balanced by the liability to
discharge, was of very little worth to the worker, in view of the fact
that the rate of wages was at about the same point wherever he might go,
and the change would be merely a choice between the personal dispositions
of different masters, and that difference was slight enough, for business
rules controlled the relations of masters and men."
I rallied once more.
"One point of real superiority at least you must admit the wage-earner
had over the chattel slave. He could by merit rise out of his condition
and become himself an employer, a rich man."
"Surely, Julian, you forget that there has rarely been a slave system
under which the more energetic, intelligent, and thrifty slaves could and
did not buy their freedom or have it given them by their masters. The
freedmen in ancient Rome rose to places of importance and power quite as
frequently as did the born proletarian of Europe or America get out of
his condition."
I did not think of anything to reply at the moment, and the doctor,
having compassion on me, pursued: "It is an old illustration of the
different view points of the centuries that precisely this point which
you make of the possibility of the wage-earner rising, although it was
getting to be a vanishing point in your day, seems to us the most truly
diabolical feature of the whole system. The prospect of rising as a
motive to reconcile the wage-earner or the poor man in general to his
subjection, what did it amount to? It was but saying to him, 'Be a good
slave, and you, too, shall have slaves of your own.' By this wedge did
you separate the cleverer of the wage-workers from the mass of them and
dignify treason to humanity by the name of ambition. No true man should
wish to rise save to raise others with him."
"One point of difference, however, you must at least admit," I said. "In
chattel slavery the master had a power over the persons of his slaves
which the employer did not have over even the poorest of his employees:
he could not lay his hand upon them in violence."
"Again, Julian," said the doctor, "you have mentioned a point of
difference that tells in favor of chattel slavery as a more humane
industrial method than the wage system. If here and there the anger of
the chattel slave owner made him forget his self-restraint so far as to
cripple or maim his slaves, yet such cases were on the whole rare, and
such masters were held to an account by public opinion if not by law; but
under the wage system the employer had no motive of self-restraint to
spare life or limb of his employees, and he escaped responsibility by the
fact of the consent and even eagerness of the needy people to undertake
the most perilous and painful tasks for the sake of bread. We read that
in the United States every year at least two hundred thousand men, women,
and children were done to death or maimed in the performance of their
industrial duties, nearly forty thousand alone in the single branch of
the steam railroad service. No estimate seems to have ever been attempted
of the many times greater number who perished more indirectly through the
injurious effects of bad industrial conditions. What chattel-slave system
ever made a record of such wastefulness of human life, as that?
"Nay, more, the chattel-slave owner, if he smote his slave, did it in
anger and, as likely as not, with some provocation; but these wholesale
slaughters of wage-earners that made your land red were done in sheer
cold-bloodedness, without any other motive on the part of the
capitalists, who were responsible, save gain.
"Still again, one of the more revolting features of chattel slavery has
always been considered the subjection of the slave women to the lust of
their masters. How was it in this respect under the rule of the rich? We
read in our histories that great armies of women in your day were forced
by poverty to make a business of submitting their bodies to those who had
the means of furnishing them a little bread. The books say that these
armies amounted in your great cities to bodies of thirty or forty
thousand women. Tales come down to us of the magnitude of the maiden
tribute levied upon the poorer classes for the gratification of the lusts
of those who could pay, which the annals of antiquity could scarcely
match for horror. Am I saying too much, Julian?"
"You have mentioned nothing but facts which stared me in the face all my
life," I replied, "and yet it appears I have had to wait for a man of
another century to tell me what they meant."
"It was precisely because they stared you and your contemporaries so
constantly in the face, and always had done so, that you lost the faculty
of judging their meaning. They were, as we might say, too near the eyes
to be seen aright. You are far enough away from the facts now to begin to
see them clearly and to realize their significance. As you shall continue
to occupy this modern view point, you will more and more completely come
to see with us that the most revolting aspect of the human condition
before the great Revolution was not the suffering from physical privation
or even the outright starvation of multitudes which directly resulted
from the unequal distribution of wealth, but the indirect effect of that
inequality to reduce almost the total human race to a state of degrading
bondage to their fellows. As it seems to us, the offense of the old order
against liberty was even greater than the offense to life; and even if it
were conceivable that it could have satisfied the right of life by
guaranteeing abundance to all, it must just the same have been destroyed,
for, although the collective administration of the economic system had
been unnecessary to guarantee life, there could be no such thing as
liberty so long as by the effect of inequalities of wealth and the
private control of the means of production the opportunity of men to
obtain the means of subsistence depended on the will of other men."